The dyad page that Leah and I created for our project includes the pre- and post-production plan, using Mindmeister, here: http://dliuri2013.wikispaces.com/Dyad+1
The website that we designed and presented for our project will be published on Paul Cuffee's LibGuides page, but unfortunately the link is not yet live. Our reflection video can be found on Michelle Schira Hagerman's youtube stream:
Descriptions and plans for use are included in the comments for each pin, and if you click on the pin, it will take you to the wiki page for each session.
Out of all the cool tools I learned about at the institute, the one I will probably use most frequently is Storify. I thought Rhys Daunic did an awesome job showing us how to use it in the short amount of time he had, and I was very happy with the few Storify samples I was able to create during the week. One of them was actually my sample student product for the project that Leah and I did together. This is what it looked like:
I also created a Storify about the Institute itself, and that one can be found here:
SEVEN QUESTION REFLECTION ASSIGNMENT:
Digital Literacies Institute Closing Reflection
1. Describe some of the digital literacies that you learned about this week. What did you know about these topics before the week began and how have this week’s experiences contributed to your understanding of these digital literacies?
This week, I learned that “digital literacies” is a much more user-friendly, accessible term and concept than I thought before. I had assumed that because I don’t participate in Facebook, I could be labeled “digitally illiterate.” But this week I learned a lot about what is meant by “digital literacies,” and I don’t think I could be labeled “digitally illiterate” after all! At the Cool Tool sessions, I learned about Storify, Storybird, Evernote, Screencast-O-Matic, iMovie, infogr.am, Google Sites, and CodeAcademy and I would now consider myself literate in all of those digital applications. Before the week began, I knew nothing about most of the above listed applications. Now I know how to use them and can choose which ones will be useful to me in different contexts with different audiences.
2. Now that you’ve had this professional development experience, how are you defining “digital literacy?” What is your personal perspective on digital literacy and how has your definition changed or evolved this week?
I am now defining digital literacy as the understanding of and ability to navigate and produce digital and online texts and media. Just as regular old “literacy” is the understanding of and ability to navigate and produce written text, digital literacy has the same meaning to me now, except in the digital world. In my personal perspective, digital literacy is crucial for our students, because we will be failing them in a major way if we teach them to read and understand all the literary classics, but leave them to their own devices in the fast-paced digital world that actually comprises much of their lived experiences. Many people speak of students as “digital natives” because they’ve grown up in an age of computers and technology, but simply being around these things does not automatically make young people proficient in when and how to use them.
My opinion has evolved this week because in the past, I will admit, I could easily have downed a bowl of luddite punch and lined up with the rest of the tech-hating teachers who banish new-fangled cyber-stuff from their classrooms. I was leaning in that direction and a firm nudge could have pushed me over the stone age edge. But now I have a much more enlightened view on the whole e-scene, and I see that technology, just like any other powerful tool, can be used for good or for evil, and as a teacher, it should be part of my responsibilities to help students learn how to use it for good.
3. How do digital literacies affect the way you think aboutacademic content? Describe an example of how some specific academic content is affected by changes in the ways we read, write and think with digital media texts, tools & technologies.
One academic content area that has been shaped by digital literacies is actually the dictionary. I remember being blown away when I heard on NPR that the Oxford English Dictionary, which has long been the gold standard of definitions in my book, has taken to the internet and developed all sorts of useful new ways to look up words. The flexible interface of an online platform allowed the developers at OED to create a database that is not just searchable in alphabetical order, as the print copies are, but by other, more practical methods as well. For instance, if a person couldn’t think of a specific word but knew what it meant, he could search for a term from the definition and pull up all words with definitions containing that term. What’s more, a person could follow OED on Twitter and receive interesting words with accompanying definitions throughout the day! That’s content my beloved hard copy never managed to offer me.
After having watched Page One: Inside the New York Times, I’ve also learned a lot about how digital literacies have affected the academic content of news. The way we read, write and think with digital media texts, tools and technologies has changed Americans’ ideas of when and how to receive news about the world around them. In the past, people would learn what happened on any particular day by reading the daily newspaper or watching the evening news, where trained journalists had spent hours, days or even weeks uncovering and preparing information. When the internet arrived on the scene, people had immediate access to news sources all day, so the form of the content—and, as a result, the level of the content itself— had to adapt and evolve in order to keep up with the expectations of the patrons.
4. How do digital literacies affect teaching practices? What overarching considerations must teachers give, in general, to the interactions of digital literacies and how to teach? Now, focus on your own pedagogical practice. How will your new understanding of digital literacy affect the way you teach? Describe an example of how you will differently employ a specific teaching practice in your own context as a result of what you learned this week. Digital literacies affect teaching practices because we should be keeping up with what our students need to know and be able to do in order to provide instruction to match that.
Digital literacies affect teaching practices because we should be keeping up with what our students need to know and be able to do in order to provide instruction to match that. In thinking about my own pedagogical practice, I can’t wait to get back to school in September and start sharing all of these cool things that I’ve learned with my students. One example of how I will do that has to do with flipping the deficit-oriented view that teachers sometimes have about English Language Learners. In my ELL class, I am responsible for assisting students with the work that they receive in content area courses. My plan is to show them different applications and programs that will help them to create impressive projects for their classes, so that their peers and their teachers will view them in a positive light as people who have new and important information to share with others. Also, a lot of the digital literacies practices and programs I learned about incorporate pictures, and those are always helpful for ELLs. Storybird, for instance, is a great way to visually represent information.
5. During the week, you were introduced to several concerns and promising practices around digital literacy, digital pedagogy, social networking, and student voice that are circulating among communities of educators, librarians, and youth media specialists. From your perspective, what promising practices show the most potential? Which specific concerns are most pressing? What key takeaways will you champion in your own work setting(s) so that together, you and your colleagues can (a) implement promising practices and (b) address issues of concern?
Well, I’m glad you asked! :-) One of the absolute coolest things I found about this past week was Powerful Voices and the work that the organization does in Philadelphia with public school districts around digital literacies. David Cooper Moore was inspiring in the session that dealt with incorporating digital literacies into existing school curriculum. The videos he showed of elementary school children clapping to identify scene changes were awesome. One concern that I was having when we learned about single-episode lessons, such as Mary Moen’s great poll about cell phone usage, was that digital literacies were being forced into a corner through sporadic, inconsistent implementation of focused lessons.
What Powerful Voices does is twofold: provide direct instruction opportunities in classrooms, and design and facilitate customized faculty professional development to assist teachers in developing their own digital literacies curriculum that would work in their schools. It’s the latter that Leah Lubman, the librarian at Paul Cuffee School where I work, and I were most interested in, and we spoke with Deborah Gist on the day of the panel discussion about developing a partnership between Cuffee and Powerful Voices. She told us she was interested, but keeping in mind Jonathan Friesem’s important question about who should actually be fiscally responsible for these programs, we pushed a little further with a letter that specifically requested an avenue through which we could propose a program so we could ask for designated funding. That letter is included below, and Deborah has since responded with positive feedback about whom we should direct our proposal to at RIDE. David, Leah and I had a Google Hangouts meeting to design the letter and discuss the direction we’re interested in going, and we have another Google Hangouts meeting scheduled for the week of August 12th!
Our letter:
July 25, 2013
Commissioner Gist RI Department of Education 255 Washington St. Providence, RI 02903
Dear Ms. Gist,
We are writing to follow-up on our recent conversation with you at the __Summer Institute in Digital Literacy__. During our talk we mentioned some of the digital literacy needs Paul Cuffee High School, now in its fourth year, is currently struggling with: difficulty with teacher buy in, and teachers needing a central project in order to focus on implementation of digital literacy goals.
Our staff is working extremely hard to meet all of the needs of our first graduating class. Without broad support it can be difficult for them to find ways to embed digital literacy into the 9-12th grade curriculum. We hope that in partnering with Powerful Voices for Kids, the digital and media literacy professional development program based at the University of Rhode Island, we can find ways to support staff members in long-term implementation in each classroom.
We would love to put together a proposal that might help us to connect leaders in professional development of digital and media literacy with emerging leaders in digital literacy in Rhode Island schools. We think that with the support of the Department of Education, we can develop a program that strengthens leadership in digital literacy at Paul Cuffee High School and serve as a model for building and sustaining digital literacy across grade levels and subjects in the Rhode Island school system.
At this point, what we would most appreciate from you is a clear idea of whom we should address our proposal to so that we can begin working right away. Thank you for your time, and we look forward to working with you in adding a new and exciting digital literacy distinction to our school and the state!
Sincerely,
Leah Lubman, Paul Cuffee Middle & High School Library Media Specialist Jillian Belanger, M.A., N.B.C.T., Paul Cuffee ELL Director David Cooper Moore, Program Director, Powerful Voices for Kids Media Education Lab at the University of Rhode Island
6. Consider the list of readings assigned for this course. Briefly summarize 1-2 key insights you gleaned from each cluster of readings (e.g., Digital Literacies in Context, Generating Questions, Instructional Strategies, and Next Steps). How do you see these insights connecting with ideas and experiences shared during the Institute (especially the Keynote and Digging Deeper Sessions)? ◦ If you are a graduate student, how do these readings connect to ideas in the literature base with which you are engaged? ◦ If you are a classroom teacher, librarian, or youth media specialist, what connections do you see among the readings themselves and to your experiences during the institute or in your own work setting?
Digital Literacies in Context
1-2 Key Insights:
From Sherry Turkle’s Ted Talk: We are connected, but alone. We text at meetings, at breakfast, with friends, at funerals.... We are alone together, and hiding from each other even as we are all constantly connected. Face-to-face conversations take place in real time and you can't control what you're going to say; we edit, delete and retouch ourselves on Facebook, email, texting, etc.
Similarly, from Doug Rushkoff’s Present Shock: Technology is great when it’s used to connect people in far away places, but not when people in close physical proximity use it as a substitution for “real life” interactions.
Connections with ideas and experiences shared during the Institute:
Rushkoff’s Keynote address at the institute shed new light on this concept. He said that technology is great when it’s used to connect people in far away places, but not when people in the same room are using it to connect. I would take that adage a step further and say that it’s not great when people within reasonable physical proximity use it in place of actually being in the same room either.
Connections to ideas in the literature base of my graduate program and/or my experiences in my work setting:
As a graduate student, I think it’s important to maintain a balance of activities require being physically and mentally present simultaneously. Scholars who end up spending an inordinate amount of time keeping up with the field on Twitter or immersing themselves in academic articles without ever picking their heads up to… oh I don’t know, literally go for a hike, or have a meaningful discussion about something other than academia, or stretch and do some breathing exercises… are not the kind of scholars I want to be. In fact, I was really grateful when some suggestions from the group about including time for “energizing exercise” was taken seriously, even though it meant that I had to do the boxer shuffle in front of dozens of really smart people that I had only just met, because I do believe it’s important to have that balance of technology and… I’m not sure what to call it. Physical presence? I’ll have to think of a good term: something worthy to go up against “digital literacies.” J
Generating Questions
1-2 Key Insights:
From Grant Wiggins’s “On Genuine vs. Bogus Inquiry- Using EQs Properly”: Essential questions should not be wielded by only the teacher to elicit “correct” answers; instead, students should keep pondering the EQ across readings, and take control over formulating thoughtful responses.
My favorite direct quote from Matthew Bowker’s “Teaching Students to Ask Questions Instead of Answering Them”: “Learning answers without learning questions produces a kind of ideology in which everything is already settled, in which contingencies appear as necessities, in which social constructs appear as natural inevitabilities, in which everything “is what it is” and nothing more or less.”
Connections with ideas and experiences shared during the Institute:
One connection I made to this reading cluster was with the Digging Deeper session on Tuesday, 7/16 about Online Reading Comprehension and Collaborative Inquiry. Just as we learned during that session that digital tools should be used with a specific purpose in mind, instead of simply introducing a tool for the sake of understanding the tool itself.
I also liked how Nikhil Abraham talked about coding with a purpose in mind at the Codecademy Cool Tool session; it relates to students beginning with a question in mind rather than working toward a pre-determined “right” answer.
Connections to ideas in the literature base of my graduate program and/or my experiences in my work setting:
I am already putting these concepts to work in the design of my syllabus and curriculum for this school year. Since I will be teaching ELL for the first time, I am starting from scratch, and I am focusing a lot more energy on developing essential questions that will not only fill the “essential question” slot on a form, but will be living, breathing, thinking questions that will actually prod students’ thinking and encourage thoughtful, interesting responses.
Instructional Strategies
1-2 Key Insights:
From Julie Coiro’s “Talking About Reading as Thinking: Modeling the Hidden Complexities of Online Reading Comprehension”: Think-aloud lessons must be carefully planned out; among other things, a teacher must: determine a purpose, make a plan, anticipate challenges, evaluate relevance of information in search engine results, sum up ideas, and make connections.
Connections with ideas and experiences shared during the Institute and my experiences in my work setting:
One thing that made me laugh at the institute was when the question was asked about experiences in the past where technology had failed teachers, and Linda, at my table, replied, “Whitehouse.com.” I had heard from colleagues in the past who reported, embarrassed, that they had meant to go to Whitehouse.gov and typed .com instead, taking them to an inappropriate site in front of students. It’s just one example of why thoroughly planning a lesson and anticipating challenges are important. I can see how it would be particularly important in planning think-aloud sessions, because you want to model clear thinking and connection making. Especially when I am teaching ELL students this year, I will want to carefully plan out my think-aloud lessons in order to show how I am using language to understand, analyze, and make connections to texts, online and in print.
Next Steps
1-2 Key Insights:
Renee Hobbs’s white paper, “Digital and Media Literacy: A Plan of Action” has been percolating in my brain for several months now, and my major takeaway has been her 10-step action plan to “strengthen digital citizenship and make digital and media literacy part of mainstream education in the United States.” The first three steps in particular, around supporting community-level digital and media literacy initiatives, have been in my mind as I work with Leah and David on building a digital literacy curriculum for the Paul Cuffee School. Dr. Hobbs wrote that we need to:
1. Map existing community resources and offer small grants to promote community partnerships to integrate digital and media literacy competencies into existing programs.
2. Support a national network of summer learning programs to integrate digital and media literacy into public charter schools.
3. Support a Digital and Media Literacy (DML) Youth Corps to bring digital and media literacy to underserved communities and special populations via public libraries, museums and other community centers.
Connections with ideas and experiences shared during the Institute:
I would like to again reference Jonathan Friesem’s question during the panel about who should fund digital literacy initiatives. That is an important connection to those first three steps in supporting initiatives, because teachers are often already stretched very thin, and in order to develop new curriculum, there needs to be some sort of framework in place with the financial support and resources necessary for the work.
Connections with ideas and experiences shared during the Institute and my experiences in my work setting:
I’d like to think that the project that Leah, David and I are still working on is an outgrowth or a response to the key steps that Dr. Hobbs outlined in her white paper, and therefore the reading is directly connected to my experiences in the work setting!
This past spring semester, the Harrington School of Communication and Media readDoug Rushkoff’s Present Shock for its book club. When I found out, I bought a copy, which is a major commitment for me, because I usually get everything out of the library. But I knew I would want to mark some things up on these pages, and I was right. Right off the bat, I was won over by Rushkoff’s examples of how “everything is happening now.” He described a scene in which a young woman is at a party, but she’s not mentally present because she’s texting all her friends to find out if the party’s she’s at is the best possible party to be at. When she discovers a more desirable party, she gets in a taxi, arrives at the “better” party, and proceeds to be mentally absent from that one as well, because she’s holding her phone up to take pictures of herself and post updates to her status the whole time. Rushkoff was speaking my language. It is precisely that distance from the immediate present that makes me want to naturally distance myself from technology; it seems like it’s invading “real life” and chasing everyone into remote, technology-sodden corners.
However, Rushkoff’s Keynote address at the institute shed new light on this concept. He said that technology is great when it’s used to connect people in far away places, but not when people in the same room are using it to connect. I would take that adage a step further and say that it’s not great when people within reasonable physical proximity use it in place of actually being in the same room either. As a graduate student, I think it’s important to maintain a balance of activities require being physically and mentally present simultaneously. Scholars who end up spending an inordinate amount of time keeping up with the field on Twitter or immersing themselves in academic articles without ever picking their heads up to… oh I don’t know, literally go for a hike, or have a meaningful discussion about something other than academia, or stretch and do some breathing exercises… are not the kind of scholars I want to be. In fact, I was really grateful when some suggestions from the group about including time for “energizing exercise” was taken seriously, even though it meant that I had to do the boxer shuffle in front of dozens of really smart people that I had only just met, because I do believe it’s important to have that balance of technology and… I’m not sure what to call it. Physical presence? I’ll have to think of a good term: something worthy to go up against “digital literacies.” :-)
7. If you had one more day in the Institute, what would you like to learn more about and why?How will you leverage your professional learning network and your new digital literacies to explore your remaining questions over the coming year?
If I had one more day in the institute, I would use it to go to more Cool Tool sessions! I was actually just recently emailing with Michelle Schira Hagerman and I told her that I’ve felt the absence of Cool Tool sessions in my life since the institute ended! I did choose carefully which sessions to attend based on the descriptions on the wiki, but of course there were some that I just couldn’t get to because I don’t have that special necklace that Hermione wears in Harry Potter to be two places at once. I often wish I had that. If I did, I would have definitely gone to the Symbaloo, Mindmeister, LolioNote, Animoto and Gooru sessions. Over the coming year, I will be able to use the wiki to review those different applications and hopefully gain an understanding of how to use them. I was also asked by David Quinn to join him and Mark Davis in preparing a presentation for RIDE on October 5th, which I am thrilled about. The other forthcoming project that grew from my experiences at the institute is the aforementioned partnership between Paul Cuffee and Powerful Voices—it is through this connection and initiative that I hope to explore my remaining questions about how to effectively incorporate digital literacies into existing curriculum.
PRE-PRODUCTION AND POST-PRODUCTION PLAN:
The dyad page that Leah and I created for our project includes the pre- and post-production plan, using Mindmeister, here:
http://dliuri2013.wikispaces.com/Dyad+1
The website that we designed and presented for our project will be published on Paul Cuffee's LibGuides page, but unfortunately the link is not yet live. Our reflection video can be found on Michelle Schira Hagerman's youtube stream:
COOL TOOLS REVIEW AND APPLICATION PLAN:
I have organized my review of the Cool Tools using a Pinterest page that can be found here:
http://pinterest.com/paperwithpencil/cool-tools-from-digiuri/
Descriptions and plans for use are included in the comments for each pin, and if you click on the pin, it will take you to the wiki page for each session.
Out of all the cool tools I learned about at the institute, the one I will probably use most frequently is Storify. I thought Rhys Daunic did an awesome job showing us how to use it in the short amount of time he had, and I was very happy with the few Storify samples I was able to create during the week. One of them was actually my sample student product for the project that Leah and I did together. This is what it looked like:
I also created a Storify about the Institute itself, and that one can be found here:
SEVEN QUESTION REFLECTION ASSIGNMENT:
Digital Literacies Institute Closing Reflection
1. Describe some of the digital literacies that you learned about this week. What did you know about these topics before the week began and how have this week’s experiences contributed to your understanding of these digital literacies?
This week, I learned that “digital literacies” is a much more user-friendly, accessible term and concept than I thought before. I had assumed that because I don’t participate in Facebook, I could be labeled “digitally illiterate.” But this week I learned a lot about what is meant by “digital literacies,” and I don’t think I could be labeled “digitally illiterate” after all! At the Cool Tool sessions, I learned about Storify, Storybird, Evernote, Screencast-O-Matic, iMovie, infogr.am, Google Sites, and CodeAcademy and I would now consider myself literate in all of those digital applications. Before the week began, I knew nothing about most of the above listed applications. Now I know how to use them and can choose which ones will be useful to me in different contexts with different audiences.
2. Now that you’ve had this professional development experience, how are you defining “digital literacy?” What is your personal perspective on digital literacy and how has your definition changed or evolved this week?
I am now defining digital literacy as the understanding of and ability to navigate and produce digital and online texts and media. Just as regular old “literacy” is the understanding of and ability to navigate and produce written text, digital literacy has the same meaning to me now, except in the digital world. In my personal perspective, digital literacy is crucial for our students, because we will be failing them in a major way if we teach them to read and understand all the literary classics, but leave them to their own devices in the fast-paced digital world that actually comprises much of their lived experiences. Many people speak of students as “digital natives” because they’ve grown up in an age of computers and technology, but simply being around these things does not automatically make young people proficient in when and how to use them.
My opinion has evolved this week because in the past, I will admit, I could easily have downed a bowl of luddite punch and lined up with the rest of the tech-hating teachers who banish new-fangled cyber-stuff from their classrooms. I was leaning in that direction and a firm nudge could have pushed me over the stone age edge. But now I have a much more enlightened view on the whole e-scene, and I see that technology, just like any other powerful tool, can be used for good or for evil, and as a teacher, it should be part of my responsibilities to help students learn how to use it for good.
3. How do digital literacies affect the way you think about academic content? Describe an example of how some specific academic content is affected by changes in the ways we read, write and think with digital media texts, tools & technologies.
One academic content area that has been shaped by digital literacies is actually the dictionary. I remember being blown away when I heard on NPR that the Oxford English Dictionary, which has long been the gold standard of definitions in my book, has taken to the internet and developed all sorts of useful new ways to look up words. The flexible interface of an online platform allowed the developers at OED to create a database that is not just searchable in alphabetical order, as the print copies are, but by other, more practical methods as well. For instance, if a person couldn’t think of a specific word but knew what it meant, he could search for a term from the definition and pull up all words with definitions containing that term. What’s more, a person could follow OED on Twitter and receive interesting words with accompanying definitions throughout the day! That’s content my beloved hard copy never managed to offer me.
After having watched Page One: Inside the New York Times, I’ve also learned a lot about how digital literacies have affected the academic content of news. The way we read, write and think with digital media texts, tools and technologies has changed Americans’ ideas of when and how to receive news about the world around them. In the past, people would learn what happened on any particular day by reading the daily newspaper or watching the evening news, where trained journalists had spent hours, days or even weeks uncovering and preparing information. When the internet arrived on the scene, people had immediate access to news sources all day, so the form of the content—and, as a result, the level of the content itself— had to adapt and evolve in order to keep up with the expectations of the patrons.
4. How do digital literacies affect teaching practices? What overarching considerations must teachers give, in general, to the interactions of digital literacies and how to teach? Now, focus on your own pedagogical practice. How will your new understanding of digital literacy affect the way you teach? Describe an example of how you will differently employ a specific teaching practice in your own context as a result of what you learned this week.
Digital literacies affect teaching practices because we should be keeping up with what our students need to know and be able to do in order to provide instruction to match that.
Digital literacies affect teaching practices because we should be keeping up with what our students need to know and be able to do in order to provide instruction to match that. In thinking about my own pedagogical practice, I can’t wait to get back to school in September and start sharing all of these cool things that I’ve learned with my students. One example of how I will do that has to do with flipping the deficit-oriented view that teachers sometimes have about English Language Learners. In my ELL class, I am responsible for assisting students with the work that they receive in content area courses. My plan is to show them different applications and programs that will help them to create impressive projects for their classes, so that their peers and their teachers will view them in a positive light as people who have new and important information to share with others. Also, a lot of the digital literacies practices and programs I learned about incorporate pictures, and those are always helpful for ELLs. Storybird, for instance, is a great way to visually represent information.
5. During the week, you were introduced to several concerns and promising practices around digital literacy, digital pedagogy, social networking, and student voice that are circulating among communities of educators, librarians, and youth media specialists. From your perspective, what promising practices show the most potential? Which specific concerns are most pressing? What key takeaways will you champion in your own work setting(s) so that together, you and your colleagues can (a) implement promising practices and (b) address issues of concern?
Well, I’m glad you asked! :-) One of the absolute coolest things I found about this past week was Powerful Voices and the work that the organization does in Philadelphia with public school districts around digital literacies. David Cooper Moore was inspiring in the session that dealt with incorporating digital literacies into existing school curriculum. The videos he showed of elementary school children clapping to identify scene changes were awesome. One concern that I was having when we learned about single-episode lessons, such as Mary Moen’s great poll about cell phone usage, was that digital literacies were being forced into a corner through sporadic, inconsistent implementation of focused lessons.
What Powerful Voices does is twofold: provide direct instruction opportunities in classrooms, and design and facilitate customized faculty professional development to assist teachers in developing their own digital literacies curriculum that would work in their schools. It’s the latter that Leah Lubman, the librarian at Paul Cuffee School where I work, and I were most interested in, and we spoke with Deborah Gist on the day of the panel discussion about developing a partnership between Cuffee and Powerful Voices. She told us she was interested, but keeping in mind Jonathan Friesem’s important question about who should actually be fiscally responsible for these programs, we pushed a little further with a letter that specifically requested an avenue through which we could propose a program so we could ask for designated funding. That letter is included below, and Deborah has since responded with positive feedback about whom we should direct our proposal to at RIDE. David, Leah and I had a Google Hangouts meeting to design the letter and discuss the direction we’re interested in going, and we have another Google Hangouts meeting scheduled for the week of August 12th!
Our letter:
July 25, 2013
Commissioner Gist
RI Department of Education
255 Washington St.
Providence, RI 02903
Dear Ms. Gist,
We are writing to follow-up on our recent conversation with you at the __Summer Institute in Digital Literacy__. During our talk we mentioned some of the digital literacy needs Paul Cuffee High School, now in its fourth year, is currently struggling with: difficulty with teacher buy in, and teachers needing a central project in order to focus on implementation of digital literacy goals.
Our staff is working extremely hard to meet all of the needs of our first graduating class. Without broad support it can be difficult for them to find ways to embed digital literacy into the 9-12th grade curriculum. We hope that in partnering with Powerful Voices for Kids, the digital and media literacy professional development program based at the University of Rhode Island, we can find ways to support staff members in long-term implementation in each classroom.
We would love to put together a proposal that might help us to connect leaders in professional development of digital and media literacy with emerging leaders in digital literacy in Rhode Island schools. We think that with the support of the Department of Education, we can develop a program that strengthens leadership in digital literacy at Paul Cuffee High School and serve as a model for building and sustaining digital literacy across grade levels and subjects in the Rhode Island school system.
At this point, what we would most appreciate from you is a clear idea of whom we should address our proposal to so that we can begin working right away. Thank you for your time, and we look forward to working with you in adding a new and exciting digital literacy distinction to our school and the state!
Sincerely,
Leah Lubman, Paul Cuffee Middle & High School Library Media Specialist
Jillian Belanger, M.A., N.B.C.T., Paul Cuffee ELL Director
David Cooper Moore, Program Director, Powerful Voices for Kids
Media Education Lab at the University of Rhode Island
6. Consider the list of readings assigned for this course. Briefly summarize 1-2 key insights you gleaned from each cluster of readings (e.g., Digital Literacies in Context, Generating Questions, Instructional Strategies, and Next Steps). How do you see these insights connecting with ideas and experiences shared during the Institute (especially the Keynote and Digging Deeper Sessions)?
◦ If you are a graduate student, how do these readings connect to ideas in the literature base with which you are engaged?
◦ If you are a classroom teacher, librarian, or youth media specialist, what connections do you see among the readings themselves and to your experiences during the institute or in your own work setting?
Digital Literacies in Context
1-2 Key Insights:
Connections with ideas and experiences shared during the Institute:
Connections to ideas in the literature base of my graduate program and/or my experiences in my work setting:
Generating Questions
1-2 Key Insights:
Connections with ideas and experiences shared during the Institute:
Connections to ideas in the literature base of my graduate program and/or my experiences in my work setting:
Instructional Strategies
1-2 Key Insights:
Connections with ideas and experiences shared during the Institute and my experiences in my work setting:
Next Steps
1-2 Key Insights:
- Renee Hobbs’s white paper, “Digital and Media Literacy: A Plan of Action” has been percolating in my brain for several months now, and my major takeaway has been her 10-step action plan to “strengthen digital citizenship and make digital and media literacy part of mainstream education in the United States.” The first three steps in particular, around supporting community-level digital and media literacy initiatives, have been in my mind as I work with Leah and David on building a digital literacy curriculum for the Paul Cuffee School. Dr. Hobbs wrote that we need to:
1. Map existing community resources and offer small grants to promote community partnerships to integrate digital and media literacy competencies into existing programs.2. Support a national network of summer learning programs to integrate digital and media literacy into public charter schools.
3. Support a Digital and Media Literacy (DML) Youth Corps to bring digital and media literacy to underserved communities and special populations via public libraries, museums and other community centers.
Connections with ideas and experiences shared during the Institute:
Connections with ideas and experiences shared during the Institute and my experiences in my work setting:
- I’d like to think that the project that Leah, David and I are still working on is an outgrowth or a response to the key steps that Dr. Hobbs outlined in her white paper, and therefore the reading is directly connected to my experiences in the work setting!
This past spring semester, the Harrington School of Communication and Media readDoug Rushkoff’s Present Shock for its book club. When I found out, I bought a copy, which is a major commitment for me, because I usually get everything out of the library. But I knew I would want to mark some things up on these pages, and I was right. Right off the bat, I was won over by Rushkoff’s examples of how “everything is happening now.” He described a scene in which a young woman is at a party, but she’s not mentally present because she’s texting all her friends to find out if the party’s she’s at is the best possible party to be at. When she discovers a more desirable party, she gets in a taxi, arrives at the “better” party, and proceeds to be mentally absent from that one as well, because she’s holding her phone up to take pictures of herself and post updates to her status the whole time. Rushkoff was speaking my language. It is precisely that distance from the immediate present that makes me want to naturally distance myself from technology; it seems like it’s invading “real life” and chasing everyone into remote, technology-sodden corners.However, Rushkoff’s Keynote address at the institute shed new light on this concept. He said that technology is great when it’s used to connect people in far away places, but not when people in the same room are using it to connect. I would take that adage a step further and say that it’s not great when people within reasonable physical proximity use it in place of actually being in the same room either. As a graduate student, I think it’s important to maintain a balance of activities require being physically and mentally present simultaneously. Scholars who end up spending an inordinate amount of time keeping up with the field on Twitter or immersing themselves in academic articles without ever picking their heads up to… oh I don’t know, literally go for a hike, or have a meaningful discussion about something other than academia, or stretch and do some breathing exercises… are not the kind of scholars I want to be. In fact, I was really grateful when some suggestions from the group about including time for “energizing exercise” was taken seriously, even though it meant that I had to do the boxer shuffle in front of dozens of really smart people that I had only just met, because I do believe it’s important to have that balance of technology and… I’m not sure what to call it. Physical presence? I’ll have to think of a good term: something worthy to go up against “digital literacies.” :-)
7. If you had one more day in the Institute, what would you like to learn more about and why?How will you leverage your professional learning network and your new digital literacies to explore your remaining questions over the coming year?If I had one more day in the institute, I would use it to go to more Cool Tool sessions! I was actually just recently emailing with Michelle Schira Hagerman and I told her that I’ve felt the absence of Cool Tool sessions in my life since the institute ended! I did choose carefully which sessions to attend based on the descriptions on the wiki, but of course there were some that I just couldn’t get to because I don’t have that special necklace that Hermione wears in Harry Potter to be two places at once. I often wish I had that. If I did, I would have definitely gone to the Symbaloo, Mindmeister, LolioNote, Animoto and Gooru sessions. Over the coming year, I will be able to use the wiki to review those different applications and hopefully gain an understanding of how to use them. I was also asked by David Quinn to join him and Mark Davis in preparing a presentation for RIDE on October 5th, which I am thrilled about. The other forthcoming project that grew from my experiences at the institute is the aforementioned partnership between Paul Cuffee and Powerful Voices—it is through this connection and initiative that I hope to explore my remaining questions about how to effectively incorporate digital literacies into existing curriculum.